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Oh, frig, I know what I want to say; I just can't figure out how to say it.
I've been reading a bunch of Metafandom links on the Mary Sue concept today, and trying to write a thoughtful and coherent post on how all of this is making me challenge my own core values as a writer (in a good way, I think) and it just ... will not come together. Maybe because I'm still struggling with my own reactions to it.
I particularly recommend reading Such stuff as dreams are made on, and Why the Culture of Mary Sue Shaming is Bully Culture, and on mary sue policing and why i cannot abide it. I am not saying that I agree with everything they're saying, but they've definitely given me a tremendous amount of food for thought, and made me look at the uglier side of my own drive to "write better! aim higher!" with newly critical eyes.
I feel like an idiot for not having realized the extent to which "writing well" is a moral value for me - I'm not saying that I judge people as less worthy for the quality of their writing, or anything like that, but reading these posts and trying to think of what I consider "poor" writing as being just as worthy and worthwhile and fulfilling as what I consider "good" writing - on an intellectual level, I absolutely think it is! But I still feel like a core value of mine is under siege and I'm struggling with that knee-jerk reaction - I know it's irrational and wrong, but I can't seem to make it stop. I've always pushed myself hard as a writer, and I want to keep doing that, but I want to manage to balance that with not being elitist and judgmental towards other people's writing, and I'm not sure how to do that. HELP.
It doesn't help that I don't think I'd had any idea that the creeping expansion of the Mary Sue term is as bad as it seems to be. I had no idea that people used Mary Sue for as wide a range of character types as they do - any OFC? Really? When I say "Mary Sue" I've always meant it in its narrow sense - or at least I thought I did, but then I get to thinking about all the various situations that I've used the "Mary Sue" term, and ... I'm not so sure anymore. But I definitely think of a certain type of character and situation when I hear it, so I'm struggling with both the battle to accept that as a valid character type even though my internal editor is saying NOOOO, and the fact that I think I've just been intellectually convinced that it's not really a useful term of critique but my internal editor wants to hang onto it.
It's interesting to consider Mary Sue a genre of itself, just as deserving of having fans and followers and communities grow up around it as, say, hurt/comfort or any of our other established fannish genres. Non-h/c people may roll their eyes at h/c or mock the more WTF? examples, but I don't think anyone questions its right to exist. I had honestly never thought of self-insertion that way, as a perfectly valid form of indulgence for some people that's just as deserving of its own dedicated communities and fans, but - why the heck not?
And this post iskind of completely awesome: Celebration of Mary Sue, or, Writing Advice I Could Have Used at Age 14. Because yes, this is SO much better than judging and looking down upon new writers - explaining community norms to them and giving them the tools to create their own spaces, so that they can play with the self-insert idea as long as they need to (forever, if need be) in safe non-judgmental places. Isn't that better than saying "Get your Mary Sues out of my fandom"? I'm not sure how to export that ideal to fandom as a whole, but I agree with the bloggers above that something ought to be done, because we don't want to be chasing away new writers before they have a chance to get their writing legs under them.
ETA: And here is another post making similar points. It's foolish and short-sighted to say "Don't write that!" when you can win friends and new writers in your fandom by saying, "Here is how you can take what you already have and make it better."
ETA2: Just in case anyone was thinking about it, please do not link this in Metafandom.
I particularly recommend reading Such stuff as dreams are made on, and Why the Culture of Mary Sue Shaming is Bully Culture, and on mary sue policing and why i cannot abide it. I am not saying that I agree with everything they're saying, but they've definitely given me a tremendous amount of food for thought, and made me look at the uglier side of my own drive to "write better! aim higher!" with newly critical eyes.
I feel like an idiot for not having realized the extent to which "writing well" is a moral value for me - I'm not saying that I judge people as less worthy for the quality of their writing, or anything like that, but reading these posts and trying to think of what I consider "poor" writing as being just as worthy and worthwhile and fulfilling as what I consider "good" writing - on an intellectual level, I absolutely think it is! But I still feel like a core value of mine is under siege and I'm struggling with that knee-jerk reaction - I know it's irrational and wrong, but I can't seem to make it stop. I've always pushed myself hard as a writer, and I want to keep doing that, but I want to manage to balance that with not being elitist and judgmental towards other people's writing, and I'm not sure how to do that. HELP.
It doesn't help that I don't think I'd had any idea that the creeping expansion of the Mary Sue term is as bad as it seems to be. I had no idea that people used Mary Sue for as wide a range of character types as they do - any OFC? Really? When I say "Mary Sue" I've always meant it in its narrow sense - or at least I thought I did, but then I get to thinking about all the various situations that I've used the "Mary Sue" term, and ... I'm not so sure anymore. But I definitely think of a certain type of character and situation when I hear it, so I'm struggling with both the battle to accept that as a valid character type even though my internal editor is saying NOOOO, and the fact that I think I've just been intellectually convinced that it's not really a useful term of critique but my internal editor wants to hang onto it.
It's interesting to consider Mary Sue a genre of itself, just as deserving of having fans and followers and communities grow up around it as, say, hurt/comfort or any of our other established fannish genres. Non-h/c people may roll their eyes at h/c or mock the more WTF? examples, but I don't think anyone questions its right to exist. I had honestly never thought of self-insertion that way, as a perfectly valid form of indulgence for some people that's just as deserving of its own dedicated communities and fans, but - why the heck not?
And this post is
ETA: And here is another post making similar points. It's foolish and short-sighted to say "Don't write that!" when you can win friends and new writers in your fandom by saying, "Here is how you can take what you already have and make it better."
ETA2: Just in case anyone was thinking about it, please do not link this in Metafandom.
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There's got to be a happy medium...I just don't know where!
Yeah, finding the happy medium is the problem, isn't it? Personally I'd say that a good compromise would be for fandom to recognize Mary Sue as a legitimate fanning style, not a last resort of bad writers or a symptom of immaturity, but just another kink alongside all the others we've got - hurt/comfort and smarm, ship and slash, kink and BDSM and poly, wingfic and slavefic and all the others that co-exist nervously but more-or-less peacefully under the big ol' fandom umbrella. So, yeah, there might be mocking here and there, and there will surely be people insisting that they don't/won't read self-insertions (as they're certainly entitled!) but there wouldn't be the air of moral or writerly scorn that I feel as if Mary Sues are treated with right now. I don't think the term has to be tossed out, necessarily; I think it's quite possible to discuss self-insertionism in the context of a serious writerly discussion without dismissing it or condemning those who like it, just like we can agree that PWP isn't right for a submission to a sci-fi magazine with a PG-13 rating and discuss how to build a porn-free story without dismissing porn as the pastime of people who are such social failures that they can't find a partner in real life. (There are people who feel that way about porn, but I think the general social climate in fandom tends to discourage them from going around ranting about moral degeneracy, and most don't want to anyway, out of respect for their fellow fen. But if everyone around them was doing it ...?)
So ...yeah ... just recognition of Mary Sue as a trope on equal footing with other fannish tropes that some people like and some don't -- genderswap, for example, tends to come along with a lot of gender-essentialist cultural baggage, but lots of people like it, and you can find themed rec lists and challenge, as well as deconstructions of the problematic aspects of the trope along with people trying to write it better and do non-cliche, non-problematic versions of it ... but you don't typically have fans sitting around ranting about how much they hate it and how it's bad writing and they wish people would stop writing it. There might be a few of those, sure -- I expect every trope has its vocal detractors -- but by and large they're a minority and can be pretty easily ignored by people who are involved in the part of the community that enjoys it. I've run across parody h/c that mocks the tendency of characters in h/c to succumb to statistically unlikely strings of silly, contrived injuries; it was amusing, and I think it's totally cool that it exists (and I sort of agree XD). But having a lot of that sort of thing out there, along with a lot of meta about how immature h/c is and the like ... I think it'd probably make me feel less welcome in fandom, and maybe a little guilty and ashamed of my own fantasies.
So I think it just comes down to treating Mary Sue as another trope on equal footing with wingfic or AMTDI or high school AUs or any of the other silly, fun things that we like to treat ourselves to in fandom. And prior to reading all of this meta, I would never have thought of it that way, but I think it makes perfect sense.
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(ETA: Have you always had a chibi Lex Luthor/Superman in that icon, and why have I never noticed it before?!)
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For me, personally, no matter the type of fanning practice, I've never gotten the point of flaming or bullying. But as you've both stated above, there's always that question of where you draw the line. And I feel I'm constantly playing devil's advocate to my own points of view the more I consider the issues.
I mean, mockery and critiquing are ways that some people fan. (The show MST3K lasted for eleven seasons for a reason. It was the ridiculously awful quality of the movies in question along with the ways in which they were mocked that so many found so entertaining.) Then again, mocking a movie, or even a fic, in your own space or to other like-minded individuals can be seen as different from directly addressing the creator/author and bashing their work (unfortunately the internet makes the latter faaaar too easy these days :-p)
So on the one hand, I strongly believe "to each their own" and let anyone fan on and in whatever way the choose and not deride anyone for the choices they make. However, to really uphold that, I almost feel that to tell a person they *can't* mock or dis a certain genre or practice, whether it be h/c or slash or Mary Sues, is hypocritically limiting the ways in which others fan. In wanting to respect everyone's point of view, it comes down to letting some of the those other points of view be disrespectful...'tis indeed a conundrum! :-p
Err...also, I've spent the last few hours doing research and my brain is kinda muddled, so the above may, in fact, make no sense what-so-ever and thus feel free to disregard...^_-
(Oh, and no, the Clex pic hasn't always been part of the icon, but it has been for the past year or so...but there are a LOT of images and they go by pretty fast, so, yeah, easy to miss some ^_-)
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